Chapter 14

New Movements in America

Essential Questions

• What goals did American social reformers have during the early 1800s?

I. Immigrants and Urban Challenges

• Between 1840-1860 – 4 million European immigrants

• Irish Potato Famine– 1841 – potato blight (fungus) kills Irish potatoes– Irish go to U.S. to escape starvation

• German Revolution– 1848 – revolution against harsh rule fails– Germans go to U.S. to escape political persecution– Settled in Midwest on farms and rural areas

Anti-Immigration Movements

• Native-born Americans feared losing jobs to immigrants willing to work for less

• Nativists: Americans opposed to immigration• 1849 – Know-Nothing Party:

Rapid Growth of Cities

• Cities grow because of jobs and transportation• Middle Class:

• Entertainment– Libraries– Theater and concerts– Playing cards– Bowling, boxing, baseball

New York Knickerbockers1862

Urban Problems

• City residents lived near workplaces – many lived in tenements: poorly designed apartment buildings that housed large numbers of people

• Dangers:

II. American Arts

• Transcendentalism: belief that people could transcend, or rise above, material things in life (simplicity and individualism)

• Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Margaret Fuller

• Utopian Communities:

American Romanticism

• Artists:– Nathaniel Hawthorne – The Scarlet Letter– Herman Melville – Moby Dick– Edgar Allan Poe – “The Raven”

– Henry Wadsworth Longfellow – “Paul Revere’s Ride”– Walt Whitman – Leaves of Grass– Washington Irving – Legend of Sleepy Hollow– Emily Dickinson – well known female poet – “I’m Nobody”

III. Reforming Society

• Second Great Awakening: 1790-1800s – Christian renewal movement – led to movements to fix social problems

• Temperance Movement:

African American Communities

• African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church • 1835 – Oberlin College becomes first to accept

African Americans• Some opportunity to attend schools in North

and Midwest – very limited in South – – illegal for slaves to learn to read and write– slaveholders feared revolt

Prison Reform

• Dorthea Dix:

• Others built reform schools for children

Improvements in Education

• Common School Movement:

• Schools and colleges for women opened • Thomas Gallaudet: founded first free school

for the hearing impaired in 1817

IV. The Movement to End Slavery

• Abolition: complete end to slavery

• Quakers were among the first abolitionists

• Abolitionists differed though on treatment of African Americans

• Colonization:

Famous Abolitionists

• William Lloyd Garrison: published The Liberator – founded the American Anti-Slavery Society in 1833

• Sarah and Angelina Grimke:

Famous Abolitionist

• Frederick Douglass: escaped slave who learned to read and write – published The North Star

• Sojourner Truth:

The Underground Railroad

• Network of people who arranged transportation and hiding places for fugitive or escaped slaves

• Harriet Tubman:

Opposition to Ending Slavery

• Northern workers feared freed slaves would take their jobs

• Southerners saw it as a threat to way of life socially and economically

• Gag Rule:

V. Women’s Rights

• Fighting for African American rights led many female abolitionists to fight for women’s rights

• Margaret Fuller: wrote Women in the 19th Century in 1845 – stressed individualism

Seneca Falls Convention

• First public meeting about women’s rights held in Seneca Falls, NY in 1848

• Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Lucretia Mott

• Declaration of Sentiments:

Famous Women’s Rights Leaders

• Lucy Stone: gifted women’s rights speaker

• Susan B. Anthony: turned women’s rights into a political movement for equality and voting

• Elizabeth Cady Stanton: